Principal Security Research Engineer

Security represents the most critical priorities for our customers in a world awash in digital threats, regulatory scrutiny, and estate complexity. Microsoft Security aspires to make the world a safer place for all. We want to reshape security and empower every user, customer, and developer with a security cloud that protects them with end to end, simplified solutions. The Microsoft Security organization accelerates Microsoft's mission and bold ambitions to ensure that our company and industry is securing digital technology platforms, devices, and clouds in our customers' heterogeneous environments, as well as ensuring the security of our own internal estate. Our culture is centered on embracing a growth mindset, a theme of inspiring excellence, and encouraging teams and leaders to bring their best each day. In doing so, we create life-changing innovations that impact billions of lives around the world.

Email, chat, and the web are integral parts of our everyday lives. They are essential for communication and productivity, but are also the primary ways cybercriminals exploit victims and infiltrate organizations. Attackers abuse these communication methods to steal identities through phishing, hold critical assets for ransom, inflict financial harm, and install malicious software.

Do you want to join a team dedicated to protecting hundreds of millions of people from these threats? At Microsoft Security, our mission is to make the world a safer place for all. The Messaging and Web Security Research team is a global, multidisciplinary organization of engineers, data scientists, security researchers, and program managers. With an unparalleled view of the threat landscape, we develop deep expertise in attacker techniques and use that knowledge along with the latest technology to stop it. We protect customers using Outlook.com, Microsoft Defender for O365, Microsoft Edge, and much more.

We are looking for a Principal Security Research Engineer who can turbocharge our most important initiatives and has the breadth and adaptability to take on a range of challenging projects, whether that is assessing new applications of the latest generative AI, proposing a redesign of our detection stack, or working with a partner team to integrate an amazing new customer experience across product lines. You seek out hard problems, can create quick prototypes to vet ideas, and thrive on learning and collaborating with the brightest minds across the company and industry to learn and bring the best to our team. This means that you are not only adept at conceptualizing new approaches to problems, but are also deeply involved in hands-on development. This role requires a balance of technical acumen, with a strong inclination towards prototyping, tinkering, and exploring the realms of what's possible through people, code and data.

Microsoft's mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. As employees we come together with a growth mindset, innovate to empower others, and collaborate to realize our shared goals. Each day we build on our values of respect, integrity, and accountability to create a culture of inclusion where everyone can thrive at work and beyond.

Responsibilities:

• Engage with stakeholders across our team and beyond to identify the most critical challenges worth solving
• Seek out experts across Microsoft and industry to learn about potential solutions and bring back the best and most relevant to solve our most critical problems.
• Prototype solutions (either yourself or through others) to validate ideas and adjust our strategy.
• Let a deep empathy for customers guide you to improvements that make a tangible difference.

Qualifications:

Required Qualifications:

• 7+ years experience in software development lifecycle, large-scale computing, modeling, cybersecurity, and/or anomaly detection
  • OR Doctorate in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science or related field .
• 6+ years prototyping and deploying innovative new tech that requires collaboration across multiple disciplines and teams (engineering, program management, research, data science).
• 3+ years practical experience in threat research, threat intel, or security engineering, ideally with experience in developing defenses against email or web-based threats such as phishing, malware, fraud/scams, and spam.
• 3+ years of large-scale, distributed system architectures and the software development lifecycle.

Other Requirements:

Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements are required for this role. These requirements include, but are not limited to the following specialized security screenings: Microsoft Cloud Background Check:

• This position will be required to pass the Microsoft background and Microsoft Cloud background check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience designing or implementing scalable data pipelines, threat intelligence feeds, machine learning or rule-based detection solutions, and/or cybersecurity researcher tooling and workflows.
• Experience applying generative AI and machine learning in cybersecurity.
• Experience working across multiple product teams to deliver combined innovations and features.

Security Research IC5 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $137,600 - $267,000 per year. There is a different range applicable to specific work locations, within the San Francisco Bay area and New York City metropolitan area, and the base pay range for this role in those locations is USD $180,400 - $294,000 per year.

Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here: ;br>
Microsoft will accept applications for the role until May 6, 2025.

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations and ordinances. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application or the recruiting process, please send a request via the Accommodation request form .

Benefits/perks listed below may vary depending on the nature of your employment with Microsoft and the country where you work.

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